Beauty and the Duke (7 page)

The theory had once sounded ridiculous to her as well. “If anything, whatever that tooth came from is
huge. Bigger than anything ever found. In my world, it is more important being first at discovering a thing than in being right in explaining how it came about.”

“Is it not pure hyperbole to make such a deduction from a single tooth?”

“My father believed in something that he could never prove.” Moving nearer, she willed him to feel her passion. Her
raison d’être.
“He died a laughingstock to his peers. Disgraced for what he tried to teach. Have you any idea what it is like not to have anyone believe in you?”

Folding his arms, he looked away.

“You
owe
me this chance, your grace!” She blurted the words, then stepped back, horrified by what had come over her.

“I owe you?” he asked in a clipped voice. “How did you manage to come up with that conclusion?”

He
did
owe her, a part of her shouted at her to say the words again.

He owed her for breaking her heart, for marrying her cousin, for daring to think he could come back to London, taunt her with that fossil, and then tell her he wanted Darlington. He owed her for making her come here tonight and plead her case like a vassal bowing before her lord…

“Your grace.” The butler suddenly stood in the corridor.

Erik straightened. “What is it, Boris?”

“Dessert is being served—”

Without taking his eyes from Christine, he said, “Tell them I have been called away. Bring my cloak. Have my carriage sent around,” he said. “I will be escorting Miss Sommers home.”

Boris stole a glance at Christine’s pale face. “Yes, your grace.”

After Boris retreated, Christine sidestepped Erik. “I can take myself home.”

He caught her arm. “It is a moot point. Your hackney driver has been paid and already sent away. I’ll not be missed here.”

She doubted that. His absence would be like a large black chasm. She did not want him accompanying her. “You needn’t go to the trouble.”

“I do not trouble myself over anything I do not wish to do, Christine.” He smiled his humorless smile. “I thought you would remember that about me.”

Christine pulled her arm from his hand. She had no choice but to accept. Where would she find another hack in Mayfair this time of night?

Then they were outside scurrying through the drizzle and he was handing her up into the cab of a luxurious brougham, horsed by two magnificent blacks. Once inside, she attempted to relax against the velvet squabs, watching as Erik gave orders to his driver. The coach lamps hanging from the driver’s seat cast a warm glow over his stark features, made all the brighter by the surrounding night. And as a gust of wind buffeted the coach, she felt the strange stir of something powerful.

For all of her fearlessness when it came to exploring dark, cold, and confining places where most people, especially women, would never go, all in the pursuit of her passions, her discomfiture around storms had always been something of a joke among those who knew her. But tonight she felt no fear.

Instead, she found the storm’s energy seductive. It intensified her senses, as if something inside her had awakened. Something deep and dormant within her she was not sure that she welcomed.

A moment later, Erik climbed into the carriage and sat opposite her, filling the air around her with
his heat and scent. He dimmed the single light in the carriage, causing the upper portion of his face to be darkened by shadow. The coach jerked forward and for lack of a place to set her gaze, she watched his house fade in the gaslight mists. The horse’s clip-clop on wet cobbles pulled at the edge of her mind and she folded her hands in her lap, too conscious of him as a man.

She stole a glance at him and found herself looking directly at him. Tonight was a perfect example of how he treated people, she thought, the way he had abandoned his guests at his own dinner table.

“Do not worry about Lord and Lady Willows,” he said, reading her thoughts. “I have given them the perfect excuse to discontinue our association without paying me insult. I find it disconcerting to be in the company of his wife, who thinks I am some monster ready to devour her precious daughter. Honestly?” He raised a brow. “It is a relief to carry on a conversation with someone who is not afraid of me.”

He didn’t seem relieved. He sounded cross.

She had never been afraid of him, despite what other people thought of him. She respected a man who could go against the grain of society and accomplish what he had done, caring not a fig that in the process he had greatly angered the mainstream. In many ways, he reminded her of Aunt Sophie.

But respect did not always equate to admiration and she would be a fool not to be cautious where he was concerned. After all, because of him, she had left England a long time ago.

“You have not given me your answer,” she said.

“Why don’t we continue to talk about your qualifications instead?” His smile was not kind, yet neither
was it cruel. Only curious. “How close were you and Darlington? Were you too disappointed that he wed that pretty blond assistant of yours?”

“Of course not. I hope they are happy.”

“You are good friends then.”

“Yes, of course. Why would you think otherwise?” What did any of this have to do with her qualifications?

“Is that why you want to cut him out of any find you might make when you know he is as desperate for recognition as you?”

“He has an opportunity in Perth.”

“Yet, you know I can give him a better one in Fife.”

He was right, of course. Though Christine had not seen the other fossils, if they were anything like the tooth, they, too, would be a magnificent discovery. But this was
her
discovery.

Erik leaned forward, placing his face in the pale amber light. “Then do not for one moment think you and I are not alike in the pursuit of our goals, Christine. We are both selfish.”

“What does that mean?”

“We are both willing to sell our souls for a price. Only I did it a long time ago and have become more adept at the game. You are just beginning your journey. Or are you?”

“You’re…mad!”

He laughed. “Aye, that is what they say. But that is not why you left England ten years ago. Is it, now?”

Her heart racing, Christine recognized too late the trap he had set for her.

“I did not run away from you. I walked. Surely, ye do not still hold that against me?” she mimicked his slight Scottish brogue.

“Ah,” he said quietly, amusement in his eyes. “But that does not explain why ye came back just one more time, now does it?”

“I should think what happened between us that night would explain it with clarity.”

“Just one last
fook
for old time’s sake? Was that it?”

Christine had forgotten just how far away from him she had run to forget him. Leave it to him to bring out the worst in her. She had never struck a person in her life, but she was suddenly balling her fist, prepared to give him a facer he’d never forget. He caught her wrist in midair. She would have struck him with her knees if she could have moved against the weight of her skirts. Her inability to defend herself only amplified her feeling of vulnerability and defeat and made her more furious. Until she had finally spent herself and he was no longer restraining her as much as he was using his weight to hold her in her seat.

Aware of a sudden burn behind her eyes and his breath against her temple, she lifted her chin.

She expected to see only anger equal to hers in his eyes, but in his dark expression, she saw something else entirely, something that reflected back into her own eyes, primitive and all-consuming. Recognizing that they were both capable of such violence frightened her.

“It is well and good that we finally clear the air between us, Christine,” he breathed against her mouth.

Her lips parted, but whether in protest or invitation, she knew not. He seized upon her hesitation and covered her mouth with his. A hot openmouthed kiss that pinned her to the bench. Like the clever black-hearted devil he was, he swooped between the cracks of her defenses. She made a token effort to deny him. But he dragged her across his lap, bringing her down to the bench beneath his weight.

His tongue swept deeply into her mouth and met hers, a tempestuous battle that shattered all boundaries between them and made her earlier resistance seem childish. As if an earthquake swept through her psyche, the past crumbled, and she was without pride, returning the force of his passion and reveling in sweet desire. He tasted like rich coffee and brandy and hot gratifying sex in an elemental way that made her feel alive.

He groaned, his hand burrowing through her hair, dislodging pins. Their mouths angled, devouring, as if both of them had suffered in hunger for so long. His palm traced her waist and stroked upward to her breast. A tremor went through her and she gave a small gasp of surrender.

Her fingers curled against his chest and pushed. “Nay, Erik,” she protested weakly, “I cannot.”

Closing his fist in her hair, he drew back, their mouths so close they shared the same air. Their eyes clashed and held, crackling hot, but not as much from lust or the physical link they still shared as from the great purge of emotion.

He was like the vortex of a storm swirling around her, sucking and pulling at all of her senses. If she did not anchor herself now…

It was as if the past had snagged her, and the realization that his assessment of her character rang with truth. It was as if, from the moment she put on the ring and opened the door to see him in the corridor, she had gone back ten years to the point where she had been.

The very moment when, amidst the laughter of a thousand people, and from across a candlelit ballroom that glittered with gold-draped walls, she’d first glimpsed him standing alone near the French doors.
He’d worn his youth and solitude like a mantle of iron, as if daring a person to tear it off him.

That summer she had tried.

She’d lost her heart to the daring and defiant duke. She had been young and impulsive and so full of her sense of self-importance that she’d believed in fairytales. She would not allow him to steal her dream again. “I was barely eighteen, Erik,” she whispered. “You were about to announce a betrothal to my cousin—”

“You’ve not been
barely
eighteen since you crawled into my bed the first time.” His eyes burned into hers. “You not only left England, ye left this side of the world. I did not even know where you’d gone for a year.”

She shoved against his chest. “You pined so much for me that you’ve been married? Twice? You correspond with my father but not me? You come here now to hire Mr. Darlington…. You make it too easy to forget we were even
friends.
” Before they’d been lovers.

That she had taught him the names of constellations even as he had shown her how beautiful the stars could truly be.

“You make it easy to forget everything,” she whispered.

He slid his knuckles beneath her chin and tilted her face into the misty light. “You make it too easy to remember. I am glad to see there is more than ice water still running through your veins.” His tone was a study in composure, where only moments ago he had kissed her with hot, openmouthed abandon.

She splayed her fingers against his chest and felt the beat of his heart on her palms. “Loose me. Please, Erik.”

To his credit, he did. She clamored from the bench back to the other side and straightened her clothing. Her lips felt swollen, pillaged. She felt self-betrayal, having succumbed to him like some demirep willing to sell her soul for a tuppence of pleasure. Or for a chance at his fossils. Shaken to her core, she would not let herself look at him until she had regained some semblance of composure, relieved to find the only damage seemed to be to her chignon, which draped loosely at her nape.

He reached over to the opposite window and raised the shade to look outside. She welcomed the darkness inside the carriage as she removed her spectacles and attempted to clean them. Somewhere across London, a distant flash of lightning marked the storm’s fury, one that equaled the tempestuous, if silent, battle now being waged inside this coach.

She set her glasses back on her nose then raised her chin. Erik was watching her with an intensity that burned with familiar unwelcome warmth.

“I will give you your beast of Sedgwick, Christine,” he said at last. “But it will be as my wife that you will come to Scotland and live in my home and around my sister and daughter. If you want this beast so much, you will wed me to have it. Those are my terms.”

“Marriage.” His words floored her. “Your terms? Just like that?”

As if she were one of his business acquisitions. Just that fast, he had homed in on her one weakness, sweeping down with talons outstretched like the hawk he was. Her eyes narrowed.

This was not a spontaneous decision. Erik Boughton did not act impulsively. He had not become known and feared in London society because he was reckless and soft. The devil duke of Sedgwick played
chess like no man she had ever met. And he always played to win.

“Papa never suggested Darlington. He suggested me,” she said calmly as much to herself as she spoke the words to him. “You’ve manipulated me. You must have known all along if you came to me with that fossil that I could not turn down the prospect of finding that beast. But you wanted more,” she whispered in astonishment. “So you had to make sure I came to you. Make sure I understood what I had in my hands enough to…to…Is this some sort of punishment on your part to even the score between us?”

“No, Christine.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his quiet tone demanding her attention. Nothing else would have forced her to look at him. “But I will admit that the idea of marriage to you began to weigh heavily after your father and I began to correspond last year. You were still unmarried. I am in need of a wife. But this is not something I take lightly. I was not sure until tonight that we would suit.”

“Because we are both
selfish?
”